“the first packages have been frozen! Whoooa.” That's how Andreas Barth starts the release update! We're still talking about a December release.
Quote:

Hi,

the first packages have been frozen! Whoooa.

Although we all have been waiting for this to happen for a quite sometime now, this doesn't mean all is set. We have a very tough timeahead of us to actually release in time in December 2006, and weall have to set the release as priority one in order to make it happen.We especially have to give it priority over flame wars.

As we're getting nearer to the release, you will at least see a monthlyrelease update from us from now on. If you want to see only a few, helpus to release etch in time!

Also, now is the right time to start worrying about the release notes. Ifyou have any issues you would like to see covered, please file a bugreport against the release-notes pseudo-package now. If possible, pleaseinclude a (short) proposed text.

RC bug count============

We are still seeing many uncoordinated uploads to unstable. These oftentie up different transitions and block them. Currently, a lot of fixesare kept in unstable, as they're tied to the perl and the neon transition;as perl is starting to look better, it might be possible to clear thistransition during the next few days.

If you are maintaining a library package with some reverse dependencies,we would like you to coordinate every SONAME-changing upload with therelease team. We have talked to the ftp-team to be notified if suchuploads are in NEW, but we would prefer if you would talk to us earlier.

Even if you don't change the SONAME, be aware that your package may be ablocker for others, so waiting a few days often helps all of us. Severalwebsites help to check if your package is involved in any transitions [1].If you are unsure, you can always ask the release team.

The RC bug tracker shows about 354/270 as of today release-critical bugs –that is way too much (the first number is the number of RC bugs in etch,and the second number is the number of RC bugs that are neither fixed inetch nor in unstable). Please help us reduce this number. At thispoint, we want to remind you that we have a permanent BSP: You can upload 0-days NMUs for RC-bugs open for more than one week. However,you are still required to notify the maintainer via BTS before uploading.And of course, you need to take care of anything you broke by your NMU.Please upload security bug fixes with urgency high, and other RC bugfixes with urgency medium – as of writing this, we have almost 70 bugsolutions waiting for testing propagation, which is a bit too much.

Please see the Developers Reference for more details about NMUing [2].

Python======

The python transition is still going on, please see the recent mailto debian-devel-announce for details.[4]

gcc-4.X transition==================

Has been finished for some time. The few remaining bugs with the newcompiler (mostly packages failing to build due to stricter checking)should be fixed in the next few weeks and are mostly removed from etchalready.

Toolchain and base freeze=========================

The toolchain is mostly in the stable state we would like to see it infor etch. There are, however, some issues on hppa which cause us someworries.

There has been some confusion about the Etch release goal about IPv6. Ourunderstanding of that release goal is that all network applications should beable to work with both IPv4 and IPv6. Also stateful packet filtering shouldwork for both protocols. Please consider all bugs tagged “ipv6″ to beupgraded to at least important – or even better, fix them.

SELinux support===============

Etch will not ship with SELinux turned on by default. However, Etch shall ship with all the SELinux components required for users to run anSELinux enabled machine, including an optimized version of the referencepolicy. The policy would be tested to work for a bare-bones “standard”installation (that is, a base system with all packages with prioritystandard or higher) and with some popular packages like apache, bind,postfix and sendmail (in other words, most common server packages).

At this point, some non-SELinux packages (coreutils, pam, sysvinit) arerunning with older SELinux patches. These need to be updated, and respective bugs will be filed in the next few days.

The kernel hasn't been frozen yet, but the toolchain is now largely inthe shape we want to see for etch.

| RC bug count less than 200

We have failed to reach this target. Because of this, more aggressiveremoval hints are being used to get release critical buggy packages outof testing. If you want to see your (or someone else's) package in etch,help getting it fixed.

This hasn't happened yet, but is being prepared and will be in place bythe next few days.

| review architectures one more time (only remove broken archs)

No architectures have been removed from the release set. It looks likeetch will be released with 11 architectures – the same as sarge, butwithout m68k and with amd64. The final status of sparc and hppa hasto be checked.

* amd64 as an official arch (and the mirror split as a pre-condition for that)

This is almost done. We are still waiting for the transition of the newneon version to testing (it's still being blocked by perl's FTBFS), whichshould then bring down the uninstallability count on amd64 to 0.

* sorting out docs-in-main vs. the DFSG

We have seen some promising development here, and only a few packages needto be updated for this. Sadly, the remaining packages include glibc,automake and emacs21. Please try to help out for those.

* sorting out non-free firmware

There is at least one issue, qlogic FC host firmwares, which are neededto initialise the devices. One cannot access the attached storage without it.Unfortunately, we still need some more development time here. Although thisdoesn't sound like a large issue, it has the potential to delay the release.

* secure apt

The needed functionality is already tested and included in etch's aptversion. We still need to work out how to do key management, but therehas been some progress lately.